The latest episode of The Newsroom begins with — hold onto your hats here — a speech. And a real barnburner of a speech it is, too, full of the kind of Kennedy-style constructions and high-flown idealism that tend to result in use of the word "stirring" as a descriptor, provided the listener isn't paying especially close attention to what's actually being said.

Our annoyingly admirable hero, News Night anchor Will McAvoy, is apologizing to his viewers, live on the air, for the crime of not always being as good a journalist as he could have been. He's failed, he says, to live up to the legacy handed down by great men like "Murrow, Cronkite, Reasoner, Brinkley, Rather, Russert." To which the alert listener might reply, "Wait, you mean Dan Rather? Gunga Dan? The guy who chained himself to the tree that time?" Well, yes. His inclusion in that pantheon was no accident, as we'll see. As for Murrow and Cronkite, I hereby inaugurate the official Newsroom drinking game around their names. You might want to get some food in your stomach.

While he makes no excuses, Will attributes the shoddiness of his show and others like it to an original sin on the part of the government that's supposed to be looking out for We the People: When it granted the networks licenses to broadcast over the airwaves, he says, it should have insisted the news air commercial-free. As long as there's advertising to be sold, TV news is always going to be about ratings, and therefore about cheap sensationalism.

Now, Will is some kind of super-genius who graduated college at 19 and law school at 21, as we know, thanks to some of the helpful expository dialogue that's never in short supply on The Newsroom. I'm therefore going to attribute the commercial-free theory, which is childish and wrong, not to him, but to his creator, Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin/Will's take is wrong in at least three ways I can think of:

1. The relationship between sensationalism and ad sales works in more than one direction. The big, conservative marketers who run spots on the evening news don't, in fact, like sensationalism any more than they like gory war footage. If ABC World News suddenly started running a lot of stories about celebrity breakups and missing white girls, it would lose, not gain, ad revenue.

2. What does Sorkin think would happen if the federal government mandated that the news run without advertising? I'll save him the trouble. Here is what would happen: News-division budgets would shrink, dramatically. The networks would spend the bare minimum on news that they could get away with in order to justify their licenses. The news would get worse, not better.

3. What about 60 Minutes? It's advertiser-supported, and for most of its 44-year run, it's been both very profitable for CBS and generally considered the best news programs on television. Or what about Meet the Press, whose longtime host Will name-checks in his honor roll?

Those two shows are outliers, but they're not anomalies. It's possible to explain why they've managed to sustain a certain level of quality, more or less, while network newscasts have faded and cable news has become, as Will puts it, "the circus." For starters, it's a matter of branding. Smart accountability journalism is the 60 Minutes brand. It's what viewers tune in for, not to find out what happened that day while they're nuking a Healthy Choice or because football is over and the remote's gone walkabout again. You can't sell 60 Minutes without the quality any more than you can sell a Porsche with a Kia engine.

Even more than that, though, 60 Minutes and Meet the Press are both weekly shows. They're not nightly, and they're certainly not round-the-clock operations like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Want to know the real reason the news is so much worse than it was in the days of Murrow and Cronkite? (Bottoms up!) It's because there's so much more of it, produced by ever fewer journalists. The relationship between viewership and ad rates is mutable, but the one between quantity and quality is absolute.

The problem with that disappointingly grownup explanation is that it lacks narrative oomph. For Sorkin's purposes, we need a bad guy, and, in this episode, we get Jane Fonda, aka the ex-wife of Ted Turner, the Last Good-Guy Executive in Cable News, and her character's named Leon, as in Helmsley, and no one else ever I can think of. Wink-wink, nudge, and all that.

Cruella — excuse me, Leona — has summoned Charlie to the company's Dr. Strangelove-ian boardroom to chew him out for Will's speech and News Night's liberal crusading. Played in a bizarrely hammy performance by Sam Waterston, Charlie is the Conscience of Journalism personified, a man who, like us, has been driven to drink by the memory of Murrow and Cronkite. Like all super-villains, Leona suffers from an inexplicable urge to articulate her sinister plot to her victims. In her case, it involves not giant lasers but tailoring ACN's news programming to please her dinner-party friends: the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party candidates they've just helped usher into office.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's more or less the paranoid scenario Dan Rather laid out in the $70 million lawsuit he filed against CBS and its chairman, Sumner Redstone, after it forced him off the air over his role in the Bush National Guard documents fiasco. Unfortunately for Rather, Redstone was never so incautious, as far as I know, as to utter anything as self-incriminating as "I have business in front of this Congress, Charlie!" Then again, if The Newsroom were edited to consist only of dialogue that people actually might utter in the real world, each episode would be about six minutes long.

--
Jeff Bercovici is a writer for Forbes living in New York City. He has covered media for more than ten years.